We are proud to announce that LEAD Technologies has won an SD Times 100 award within the APIs, Libraries & Frameworks category in recognition of its flagship SDK product line, LEADTOOLS. This year marks the 7th year in a row LEAD has been recognized by SD Times as a standout company and it is an honor to be acknowledged alongside this prestigious group. While there are plenty of new players who have made waves in the industry and are represented on the SD Times 100 list, it is a testament to the years of experience and hard work of our team that we have kept at the forefront of development innovation year in and year out.

After being in this industry for a while, it's always fun when new hires and college recruits come in with varying degrees of experience. Some are well-versed in the SDK world, while others are dead-set on using notepad and doing everything from scratch. This gave us the idea to come up with 10 reasons to use an imaging SDK, or even just an SDK in general. So here they are in a semi-particular order, because many of them build off of or hinge upon the first two:

1. Save time. Many features found in imaging SDKs such as OCR, Barcode, Forms, DICOM, PACS, etc. would take years to develop on your own. Using an SDK can shorten your development life cycle to less than a month.
2. Save money. In the business world, most of us don't have the luxury of waiting years to develop a product. The time saved by using an SDK can easily recoup the development costs since you can start selling your product much earlier.
3. Two heads are better than one. SDKs let you borrow from another developer's expertise so you can focus on yours.
4. Nothing new under the sun. No sign of disrespect, but your project or something similar to it has probably been done before. A well-respected SDK with a wide user-base has valuable insight and experience that could help you with more than just calling its functions.
5. Dependable libraries have already gone through the wringer. This is especially true for established commercial libraries and oftentimes less for open-source. When an SDK is that company's line of business, you can trust that they have tested it and ensured its quality across a wide variety of platforms, images, and scenarios.
6. Expand your customer base. SDKs can give you a greater confidence in bidding on more diverse projects, tapping in to additional revenue sources.
7. Easy cure for feature creep. Usually looked upon as a negative in the development process, feature creep can be handled with grace and ease with the right SDK. Impress your bosses and clients with how fast you can go with the flow and expand your project's scope.
8. Easy to find help. The more popular an SDK is, the easier it will be to find help using it. This can be directly through that SDK's customer service, 3rd party forums, blogs, or even bringing in contract work for your project.
9. Compliance. Ever looked through the specifications for a file format? How about DICOM? Beyond the baseline complications of decoding and encoding information correctly, vertical markets such as health care and government require a high level of security and compliance that an SDK will help navigate and keep your product in line with.
10. Fun! This may be more subjective and personality-dependent, but I think the vast majority of us find great satisfaction in trying new things and creating a variety of projects. Rather than working on one thing for an extended time, using SDK can open up the door to completing many different projects over the course of your programming career.

If we've somehow convinced you in this post, or if you were already attune to the benefits of using an imaging SDK, you can take a deeper look and learn why you should choose LEADTOOLS as your imaging SDK provider.